Posts Tagged ‘workaround’

I’ve been having problems with VMWare on a Linux host. I have a guest OS of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. After running for a day or so it will usually get into a state where something is going crazy with the video driver and Linux appears to be unresponsive. I can remotely log into the linux box and see that VMWare is using a lot of resources, but there should be plenty of memory still. Hopefully I can figure out why this is happening, but until then, I’d like to be able to shut down the VMWare guest gracefully without having to kill the app.

I am using the free VMPlayer 5.0.0 which does not come with any command line tools for control of guest VMs. However, VIX tools are available as a separate download. (You will need a My VMware account to download the package.)

Once I downloaded and installed the package I tried using the vmrun tool, but was running into some issues.

$ vmrun -T player list
Unable to connect to host.
Error: The specified version was not found

This page pointed my in the right direction. For VMPlayer 5.0.0 I had to add this line to the file /usr/lib/vmware-vix/viwrapper-config.txt

player 14 vmdb 5.0.0 Workstation-8.0.0-and-vSphere-5.0.0

Add that line below the last player line.

Now I was able to see my running guest VM and shut it down gracefully.